The Second Law and Rivalrous Digital Information (Or Maxwell's Demon in an Information Age)

Over thirty years ago Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, in an extraordinary book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process opened up a whole new branch of environmental economics, exploring the impact of a fundamental, though not widely known, law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics, on the economic process. The 2nd law of thermodynamics basically says that when energy gets transformed some of it always gets wasted. No matter how efficient we make any machine it will always waste energy to some degree. This has implications for the knowledge society. There is a widespread belief that once information is digitised it can be copied and distributed at zero marginal cost but digital information fundamentally depends on access to a source of energy. And it turns out that large data centres and servers use up a lot of energy. The big technology companies' energy bills can run into hundreds of millions of dollars. In a world facing an energy crisis that means digital information is a little more rivalrous than we originally thought..

Ecology, intellectual property and a five point plan for a sustainable public domain?

At the turn of the century, Harvard evolutionary biologist and all round science polymath Edward O. Wilson wrote that more that 99% of the world's biodiversity was unknown and that we should rectify that state of affairs, since our ignorance was contributing to the destruction of the environment. He outlined a five point plan for doing this. 1. Comprehensively survey the world's flora and fauna. This will need a large but finite team of professionals. 2. Create biological wealth e.g. through pharmaceutical prospecting of indigenous plants. Assigning economic value to biodiversity (e.g. as a source of material wealth as food or medicines or leisure amenities) is a key way to encourage its preservation. 3. Promote sustainable development i.e. 'development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'. 4. Save what remains i.e. being realistic we are not going to halt environmental degradation overnight. 5. Restore the wild lands e.g. through designating large areas of land as natural reserves like Costa Rica's 50,000-hectare Guanacaste National Park. Could we conceive of a parallel five point plan for protecting the global information store that is the public domain, the diversity of which is potentially endangered by what James Boyle so eloquently argues is a second enclosure movement

Colmcille and the Battle of the Book: Technology, Law and Access to Knowledge in 6th Century Ireland

Many hundreds of years before the GPL was even a twinkle in Richard Stallman's eye, an Irish monk proved to be an unlikely champion of the geeky A2K notion of access to knowledge. The short version of the story of Colmcille and the battle of the book goes something like this - One monk copied another monk's manuscript. The second monk objected and they settled things the way they did in those days, with 3000 people getting killed in the resulting battle. The interesting thing from the A2K (access to knowledge) perspective is that there was an attempt, prior to the battle, to settle the dispute in the Irish High Court at the time; and remarkably, the arguments invoked in that hearing could have come straight out of one of the modern digital copyright disputes. Have attitudes to law and technology really changed a whole lot in 1400 years